Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [96]
The most interesting aspect of the menu is the build-it-yourself pasta selection. You choose penne, spinach fettuccine, angel hair, linguine, or bowtie noodles, then pick the kind of sauce you want on them: marinara, Alfredo, creamy marinara, herb-infused oil, or Thai barbecue. After making that configuration, you can then add any one or several accompaniments to the dish from a long list of such items as artichoke hearts, capers, roast Italian sausage, olives, pine nuts, shrimp, and scallops. We got angel hair pasta with marinara sauce, roasted peppers, and gorgonzola cheese: mmm-mmm!
For dessert in this awesome sweet shop, we need ice cream (although clever-sounding cheesecakes and pies are also available). The hot fudge sundae, made with creamy fresh ice cream, comes in a tulip glass with fudge spilling over the edge, whipped cream, and a cherry on top. A beautiful sight!
Coleman’s Fish Market
2226 Market St.
304–232–8510
Wheeling, WV
LD | $
There are tens of thousands of loyal customers who believe that Coleman’s Fish Market makes the best fish sandwich on earth. It is simplicity itself: two pieces of soft white bread holding a cluster of steaming hot fried fish fillets. If you want tartar sauce, you have to ask for it, and you pay a dime extra. The sandwich is delivered across a counter, wrapped in wax paper; it is your task to find a table somewhere on the broad floor of the renovated century-old Wheeling Centre Market House, unwrap it, and feast!
The golden crust on the North Atlantic pollock fillets is made of cracker meal, thin as parchment. When you break through it, your sense of smell is tickled by a clean ocean perfume, and as the pearl-white meat seeps its warm, luscious sweetness, you taste a brand-new food, like no other fish sandwich ever created.
After you’ve eaten several dozen over time, you might want to branch out and try some of the many other excellent foods Coleman makes, all delivered over the counter in a bag for toting to a table: Canadian white sandwich (a bit blander and “whiter” tasting than the regular fish), shrimp boats and baskets, fried clams, oysters, deviled crabs, and Cajun-spiced catfish. Coleman’s really is a fish market, and if you wait in the “Special Line” (as opposed to the “Regular Sandwich Line”), you can ask the staff to cook up just about any raw fish in the case, and pay for it by weight. On the side of whatever fish you get, there are good French fries and Jo-Jo potatoes, and onion rings every day but Friday (when the deep-fryers are totally devoted to making only fish sandwiches).
Coleman’s was started by John Coleman in 1914 in the old city market (which itself dates back to 1890). Joe Coleman, grandson of John, keeps things up to date with the latest advances in nutritionally virtuous cooking oils. And the iron pavilion in which the market is located was handsomely renovated about fifteen years ago. In the heart of a muscular city better known for steel and coal more than cooking, Coleman’s is a thriving legend of American gastronomy.
Country Club Bakery
1211 Country Club Rd.
304–363–5690
Fairmont, WV
(Closed Wed) | $
Culinarily speaking, West Virginia has a curious character. At its best, it combines the rib-sticking taste of muscular immigrants who came to make steel and mine coal with the niceties of the Old Dominion plantation table, resulting in wondrous meals of stewed chicken and dumplings with